Steve Jobs and NeXT needed sales and the CIA needed some advance compute. So goes a story in The Wall Street Journal about how the CIA helped fund NeXT initially with the purchase of 20,000 computers. Later, Jobs said he was going to move on to reinvent music (head back to Apple to launch the iPod).
While Jobs is most associated with Apple, the NeXT and Pixar eras are just as important to me. Here's a DisrupTV episode on the NeXT era.
DataIndex.US released the latest version of its Federal Data Terminations Tracker and it's worth a look. The Federations of American Scientists outlined how it tracks deleted Federal data.
CBRE released its 2026 tech talent report and it's worth a read. We'll jump to Chapter 7 and the up and coming tech talent hubs in US and Canada. No. 1 is Huntsville followed by Halifax and Colorado Springs. There's a lot more to digest and here's the PDF.
Poolside AI, an AI model-builder, is reportedly in a non-exclusive licensing deal with Nvidia for $6 billion. Per Eric Newcomer, Nvidia will also invest $1 billion in Poolside. The deal rhymes with an acquihire in that 109 employees are joining Nvidia, but the founders are staying behind.
Newcomer's newsletter has the details, but the big takeaway is that Nvidia is adding some talent for its open LLM plans. Nemotron may improve more with Poolside.
WD-40 CEO Steven Brass recently talked growth strategies including social influencers, digital sales and navigating the supply chain. But the big takeaway is that WD-40 is an AI and robotics play.
See: WD-40 touts commerce, ERP overhaul
Brass said:
"So AI data centers, drone technology around the world, particularly in agriculture is a massive growth area for us. And so tapping into that growth opportunity, again for the core product and for the more Specialist products. Growth areas like robotics, automation also need significant lubrication, et cetera. And so lots of growth opportunities across robotics, automation, drone technology. And actually, another big kind of trend out there is aging capital equipment. And so older equipment tends to need and even the automotive fleet today in the medium term is aging around the world. And so they are trends that are also kind of driving further kind of consumption. And then you've got some of the other big ones, right, growth of emerging markets. And so we're certainly tapping into that."
Salesforce's Slack unit launched Slack Code, which has project specific code channels and the ability to collaborate with AI coding agents across all plans. The big idea is that you can turn multiple agent coding streams into one thread.
Marvell said Google has the right to buy nearly 59 million shares of the chipmaker at a price of $206.58 a share. In an SEC filing, Marvell said the warrants are related to an expanded partnership between the two companies.
"The expanded partnership spans a comprehensive range of custom silicon programs that attach to the TPU ecosystem, including AI inference accelerators, storage controllers, network interface controllers, memory interface controllers, and near-memory compute."
OpenAI reportedly told investors that its second quarter revenue grew 18% sequentially with larger losses. According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI's second quarter revenue was $6.7 billion, up from $5.7 billion. The second quarter operating loss in the second quarter was $12.3 billion.
Simply put, OpenAI's financials are a bad look compared to Anthropic's doubling of revenue to $11.6 billion in the second quarter. Meanwhile, OpenAI said it was hitting pause on reinforcement learning for its frontier model development.
Ed Zitron and Gary Marcus have begun to question what happens to the AI ecosystem if OpenAI fails.
Home Depot's second quarter results included a bevy of items focused on customer experience. Sales in the second quarter were $47.9 billion, up 5.7% from a year ago. CFO Richard McPhail said the company's customers continue to engage in home improvement projects, but are refraining from big projects.
What Home Depot can control is its experience. Here's a look at the takeaways:
Klarna said CFO Niclas Neglén and CMO David Sandström will leave the company in early 2027. The company also cut its outlook for the third quarter due to weakness in Germany. Klarna's second quarter results were solid.
Weave, a healthcare software provider, is going private in a deal valued at $650 million. Under the terms of the deal, Francisco Partners will pay $7.40 a share for Weave. Weave was founded in 2008 and offers customer experience and payments software for medium-sized healthcare businesses.
With Francisco Partners, Weave said it will expand its AI platform plans. Weave reported second quarter revenue of $67.5 million, up 15.5% from a year ago. In the second quarter, Weave launched an AI Receptionist built on Google Cloud's Gemini Agent Platform and added integrations in athenaOne.
Google announced Operation Blue Skies, a project to re-route North Atlantic aircraft to cut contrail-induced warming using the company's AI forecasts. In a blog post, Google said contrails account for a third of the airline industry's global warming impact. The pilot includes Google UK, NATS, an air navigation service provider, Contrails.org, Imperial College London & University of Cambridge and Met Office.
